Cultural art sensitivity

Having spent five very active years in the ethnographic arts trade, and another decade dabbling in it part-time, I’d like to share some of the fun, here. It would have been grand to have learned more of Native Canadian and Maori carvers, Australian Aboriginal art, Sami and Siberian ornamentation, and carvings found around Altai, but I haven’t been able to. And even about things I dealt in, I’m not expert. But about the Hopi, Dogon and Tarahumara I did learn some, as I did also of Balinese art, Burmese Nats, Yao Ceremonial paintings and bits about weaving, basketry and cross-stitch. I retain a deep admiration for what I’ve seen and learned of these things. Here I’ll focus mostly on the first three. Way back in time, these tribes, ethnic groups, communities or cultures all chose to live in inaccessible places to avoid marauders. As a result they haven’t suffered nearly as much from European interference as so many other “native’ peoples. Their religious observances involve dancing (shudder), masks (horror!) and aspects they’re careful about disclosing to meddlesome outsiders. Sometimes, in response to obnoxious persistence, they’ll give false info, maybe even within an elaborate put-on. Good clean fun on a two-way street that goes both up and down but where all is not equal. Visitors aren’t likely to open up about their longings or addictions, their cravings for status symbols, reliance on overkill, poisons and euphemism or unsupportable energy and resource consumption, are they? No more do Hopis, Dogons or Tarahumara wish to expose their vulnerabilities or failings. When “exotic” cultures became the object of academic study, “artifacts” became monetarily desirable collector items, sometimes quite valuable. Soon similar items were made to supply the demand, then clever entrepreneurs delineated the real (i.e. stolen) from the fake (not so imbued with taboo magic, mystery and titillation). Grave-robbing was part of this, and alcoholic longings proved useful too. I doubt any esoteric knowledge was gained. The fashion for appropriating artifacts died after abut a century, and a few “valuable” items have been returned. Some of the craftspeople are not professional: jewelers, painters, even clothiers. Some tourists still visit and look for souvenirs. At Hopi, they aren’t allowed to take photos, record sound, or even draw what they’re observing there. Dogon folk are often friendly; Tarahumara often aren’t. What’s most significant about these people, to me, isn’t their art but their preference for a simple life where others won’t be tempted to bother taking what little they have. It’s not about being “at one with nature” (maybe some jungle folk are that, or good custodians of nature or at least not very disruptive of it, but in dry places that’s extremely difficult to similarly accomplish). It’s that they’ve been able to exist in their way a long, long time – while in about a century we’ve insured that our culture won’t last another one. Their beliefs are more tenable, effective, practical, and sustainable. Also, traditionally they don’t make a big deal out of who is the better “artist”! Some have more than others, sure, in talent, knowledge, wealth, family or whatever, sure, but the jealous frictions rending apart our society aren’t as obvious. Among the Hopi, I can attest, they DO exist, but the extremes just aren’t there. Nor the injustices, extremes of punitive folly, mean-spiritedness… well, you get the picture. I find that some of the simple artifacts, even if made for sale, can act as a valuable reminder of this. cultural art sensitivity

Tibet, Mongolia, empire, religion and tribes

Parallels between the “mysterious (or historically neglected) East and the known West can be fascinating – for instance the “Manifest Destiny” westward expansion in what became the USA, and eastern expansion, past the Ural Mountains, of Russian people.
A case might be made for similarity between Roman Emperor Constantine, and Genghis Khan. Both seem to have found religion useful for purposes of empire.

It’s said, around 100CE a Fourth Buddhist Council was held in Sri Lanka, and there, then, details about Buddhist religion were first written down (on palm leaves). This seems to have been at least 500 years after Siddharta Gautama became Buddha, or died, even.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, “No single version of the life of the Buddha would be accepted by all Buddhist traditions.” It may be debatable whether early Buddhism prohibited depiction of the Buddha in bodily form but allowed representation by certain symbols, but I can remember places of Buddhist worship that did not use effigies.
It’s debatable whether examination of core concepts of most religions share many basic ideas: about floods, war amongst the Gods, religious names, laws, prophets, etc., and whether they all arose in navigable river basins, and when (some say: around the same time that there was a global rise in sea levels, at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 BCE). Maybe remnants of a global culture survived inland along the banks of the world's great rivers, but lost contact with each other and evolved in their own divergent ways, while retaining many core beliefs. Maybe a lot of things, but there’s good reason to question much of the teaching that goes on – and much of what’s accepted as true.
Voltaire, Tom Paine and other people of long ago questioned the “received wisdom” of those born to power, and it’s good to see others still doing so now – though their numbers seem to me distressingly small. I find it hilarious that 100 years ago there were Englishmen claiming 90% of all that can be known already was (and wonder if those making that claim were members of the preposterous “Church of England” – the absurdity of nationalism taken to perhaps its greatest height; I mean really… when I saw signs in northern Myanmar for “Southern Baptist” churches, I thought that quite ridiculous enough, not yet realizing how preposterous that other church title – normal, unquestioned, and long of great power - is).
I recently discovered it convincingly claimed that “Buddhism came of age in India but was born and reared in the chrysalis of Persia. Although persecuted by kings, it once flourished in Iran. That the cultural history of Nepal offers nothing that can be seen as a prelude to Buddhism is not surprising in view of the numerous forgeries that underlie Nepalese archaeology.” That’s from “Indian researcher” Dr. Ranajit Pal (see www.ranajitpal.com/zoroaster.html & www.lumkap.org.uk/ for details – I haven’t yet… the government of the country where I live busily censors sites – another I’d like to read, but can’t, is on how capitalism has ruined democracy). Pal claims Buddhism arose, not in North India, but in what was once Persia, and is now Iran, in an area formerly part of India (so called India within Iran). That comes from http://blog.nationmultimedia.com/trirat - “Thai School Daze, The Historical Buddha, an Earth-moving Discovery?”, Sept. 17, 2007.

Discussing the new generation of academic books meant to find popularity among general audiences I thought to say I’d like to see one on Tibet-Mongolia relations. Afterwards I did a google search and checked some entries in Britannica, and then produced the following:
7th century monk Hsüan-tsang traveled from China to India for Buddhist texts, and found “millions of monasteries” reduced to ruins by the Huns (Hsiang-nu), nomadic Central (or perhaps Altaic) people. Many remaining Buddhists had become involved in developing a form of Tantrism, an esoteric psychic-physical system of belief Indian Buddhism revived, especially in the northeast, and flourished for a time under Pāla kings (8th to 12th century CE), and the university of Nālandā became a centre for study of Tantric Buddhism and the practice of Tantric magic and rituals. Under the Pāla kings, contacts with China decreased as attention turned to Tibet and Southeast Asia. Then, with the collapse of the Pāla dynasty in the 12th century CE, Buddhism in India suffered another defeat, from which it hasn’t recovered except with “Untouchable” caste people looking for a way out of an oppressive cultural system (mostly fairly recently). Though some pockets of Buddhism and Buddhist influence remained, after Islamic invaders sacked Indian monasteries in the 12th century, Buddhism found little basis for recovery, especially as the Buddhist laity retained little interest.
Early Chinese (Han) grew millet in the Yellow River valley, while Tibeto-Burmans remained nomads. Tibet split from Burma about 500 CE, and while Tibetan language is a member of the Tibeto-Burman branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family (a linguistic construct of somewhat dubious viability), it’s been claimed that Tibetans share genetic background with Mongols. Other mutual influences are clearer. There seems to be an Indo-Scythian component to both (but that construct has problems too – the Scythian component may well have traveled to, more than through, India). A romantic claim that the Hopi of the US Southwest and Tibetans are cousins has found support in depictions of strong cultural similarities between the two groups: a Zuni-Japan connection has also been explored, but that kind of conjecture is hypothetical indeed.
In Tibet, a distinctive form of Buddhism evolved from the 600s CE. In the 600s, Tibet was a powerful kingdom with cultural contacts to China, India and Western Turkic groups in Central Asia. Buddhism was transmitted into Tibet mainly during the 7th to 10th centuries. Notable early teachers were the illustrious 8th century Tantric master Padmasambhava and the more orthodox Mahāyāna teacher Śāntirakṣita. In 1042 a teacher from India initiated a reform movement; within a century the major sects of Tibetan Buddhism had emerged. By the 12th century CE Tibet had become almost exclusively focused in importing and developing Indian forms of Buddhism and art.
The first major historical incursion into Tibet, by the Mongols, left a lasting legacy which still influences Tibet today. From another remote, land-locked country, the Mongols built a huge empire which included most of Asia, all of Russia and, briefly, parts of Eastern Europe.
Genghis Khan attacked northern China in 1210 CE, but according to the Mongol’s Secret History , it was only after the war against the Muslim empire of Khwarezm, while he was in the Oxus region, probably in late 1222, that Genghis Khan learned from Islamic advisers the “meaning and importance of towns.” Another adviser, formerly in the service to the Chin emperor, explained to him the uses of peasants and craftsmen as producers of taxable goods. He had intended to turn the cultivated fields of north China into grazing land for his horses, but began to develop bigger ideas. It’s said Genghis was stopped from advancing into India by a fall from his horse and a dream interpreted by one of his advisers as death for the Mongols should they invade India. True or not, Mongol dependence on their small horses kept them from achieving domination over swampy lower Burma, where horse hoofs sank into tricky root systems. Genghis died in 1227; in 1235; the Mongols launched an attack on Tibet (finished in 1239). It’s not clear that Genghis wanted to convert his people, but like Constantine I (“the Great”; 280 – 337 CE), he may well have perceived the benefits. Britannica reports very differently from my understanding of Constantine, whom I understand to have converted only on his death-bed, after greatly assisting in the development of the Church for what seem to me quite clearly political reasons.

It’s possible that Genghis Khan had some interest in Buddhism, but Buddhism made its major entry into Mongolia in 1244, when an important Lama went to the Mongolian court and fully submitted to Mongolian authority. The Lama's nephew became an intimate of Kublai Khan, and Kublai a patron of Buddhist religion. A Patron and Priest relationship, by which the ruler of Tibet (the predominant grand lama) was regarded as the religious adviser and priest of the Emperor, existed until the Ming drove the Mongols out, and Tibet proceeded to remove traces of Mongol influence. But influence from Tibet on Mongolia was much more considerable, especially in that Tibet provided a script for the writing of Mongolian language.
In China, the descendants of Kublai became Sinicized (Sinified? My spell-check doesn’t like either one); in Central and Western Asia, Mongols adopted Islam and Islamic culture, while in southern Russia and at home, they retained nomadic ways. Many intermingled with Turkic peoples, especially the Kipchak. Arabic and Tatar replaced Mongol as the official language of the Golden Horde.
The Tibetan nation can be divided into several groups, including the Ando, Nachan, and Hor, who further divide into 39 to 51 sub-tribes, each maintaining a distinct identity. The Hor, who are further sub-divided into thirty-nine sub-tribes, are of Mongolian and Turkic descent. Central Tibetans display a strong Mongolian genetic component, while the Kham (also known as the Khampa) are taller and longer-limbed, with sharper features and more aquiline noses, and perhaps somewhat of Scythian descent. The Eastern Tibetans are not as mixed as the Central Tibetans in the sedentary areas. At any rate, with Han Chinese expansion, animistic tribal peoples loath to succumb to hegemony found refuge in mountainous areas of southern and western China. It seems – linguistically – that some also left Tibet for less feudal, controlled and culturally stultifying, areas.
The Yi (Lolo or Wu-man), an ethnic group of Austroasiatic origin living largely in the mountains of southwest China, speak a Tibeto-Burman language; the term is used by the Chinese to designate what they formerly called the Lolo or Wu-man. They numbered about 5.9 million in the late 20th century. Their principal concentrations are in Yunnan and Szechwan provinces, with smaller numbers in northwestern Kweichow and the northern part of Kwangsi Chuang autonomous region. Almost two-thirds of the Yi live in Yunnan. The Yi language is spoken in six relatively distinct dialects. Among lesser minorities within the Yi language group are the Lisu, Na-hsi (Naxi or Moso, a branch of the Hsi-fan subgroup), Hani, Lahu, Pai and the Ching-p'o, who speak the same language as the Kachin of upper Burma. Many Na-hsi embrace Tibetan Buddhism; they also believe in various spirits and demons and, along with their shamans, have priest-exorcists of the Bon cult of Tibet.
In Yunnan, the Yi are the largest minority group in the province. Once rulers of large parts of Yunnan, the Yi are a hill people with subsistence agriculture and proud warrior traditions. Linguistically, they belong to the Tibeto-Burman group. Second largest in population are the Pai in northwestern Yunnan. Long Sinicized, the Pai are rice cultivators who are among the original inhabitants of the region.
Non-Chinese Sino-Tibetan languages of China include some Lolo-type languages (Burmish): Yi, with nearly 7 million speakers in Yunnan, Szechwan, Kweichow, and Kwangsi; Hani (Akha) with about 500,000 speakers in Yunnan; Lisu, with 610,000 speakers in Yunnan; Lahu, with about 440,000 speakers in Yunnan; and Na-hsi, with approximately 300,000 speakers mostly in Yunnan and Szechwan. Other Sino-Tibetan languages in Yunnan and Szechwan are Kachin and the closely related Atsi (Tsaiwa); Achang, Nu, Pumi (Primi), Ch'iang, Gyarung, Hsifan; and Pai (Minchia, probably a separate branch within Sinitic).

Seems to me these escapees from the feudalism inherent in empire and organized religion are important vestibules of ancient wisdom (to me, at least, demonstrably there whether one prefers to believe in it or not) but becoming increasingly “assimilated” and absorbed. Money, drugs, well-patrolled national borders and increasingly accessible communication technologies have worked, and will continue to work, to decrease diversity, and limit our options, alternatives and ability to successfully evaluate much about life. Sorry to slip into preaching…

Infinite BS & Orders of Infinity

Something that bothers me is the blind, stupefied passivity with which people, and even academic institutions, have accepted blather about “orders of infinity” and even “crunched dimensions” - contradictions in terms axiomatically not to be posited. It is as if squaring the circle were still considered possible, and worse - but I have noticed on the Net claimants to status as bordering on succeeding on doing just that. It seems to relate to insanity, crossed mental circuits, some kind of semi-epileptic, amphetamine-like monomania. Infinite means just that – no limits, of extent beyond anything else, and an infinite number of elephants and an infinite number of ants are the same size, just as a ton of lead weighs exactly as much as a ton of feathers! And a dimension extends infinitely - you simply can’t hope to put one in your pocket, no matter what you might have encountered in the comics.
But as the concepts of zero and one have no actual, unequivocal analogue in the perceptible world (nature “abhorring” a vacuum, and everything interacting with everything and lacking pure boundaries or the hard edges we assume as a convenience), and fuzzy logic has given us great screen-picture resolution, among other things, I suppose there’ll be no stopping the blather.
It all reminds me of Yale linguists Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir claiming Hopi language has no word for time, and that Hopi time-sense is circular. I expect that the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that the structure of a language tends to condition the ways in which a speaker of that language thinks (and that the structures of different languages lead the speakers of those languages to view the world in different ways) is correct, but it wasn’t even either of them who originated the idea, and apparently they didn’t talk to any Hopis about it, or, if they did, the Hopi they met must have pulled their leg the way the Dogon did with some anthropologist, claiming they came from the dark star Sirius B, a prank long ago discredited but still reflected in Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on the Dogon. The Hopi, and others, have done this kind of thing to get a laugh out of meddlesome interlopers not really willing to spend much time - I knew a young white man who some Tewa from the Hopi First Mesa had also known… he’d bragged to me about his initiation into the Chakwaina Society. The Chakwaina Katchina was modeled on the first Black man Pueblo people encountered (so he’d been made a kind of honorary nigger).
It can be so good to feel important, have something interesting to say, to pose as an achiever… I worry about falling into the same pit here.

At any rate, there’s a curious notion that one ‘infinity’ can be bigger than another (My Infinity’s bigger than your infinity, always has been and always will be). Perhaps it comes from a misguided notion that infinity is a real, instead of imaginary, number.

Recently, a now ex friend told me that I shouldn’t challenge notions I don’t understand; that some people know more than me, especially about math. Now, I’m fine to admit that some people know more about the commodities market than I do (I know scarce little about it), but somehow I think that doesn’t apply to commodities futures, or ability to think one’s way out of a paper box. I’ve learned how to think. Most people, including most academics, haven’t.

Tired from 45 days of hosting a tiresome guest (that now ex-friend), it took me a few hours to think out a word problem attributed to Frank Morgan (“The Math Chat Book”, Math Association of America 2000), which I found in John D. Barrow’s “The Infinity Book (Vintage, Random House, Great Britain, 2005). “Three guys to into a hotel, each with $10 in his pocket. They book one room at $30 a night. A short while later a fax from headquarters directs the hotel to charge $25 a night. So the receptionist gives the bellhop $5 to take to the three guys sharing a room. Since the bellhop never got a tip from them and because he can’t split $5 three ways, he decides to pocket $2 and give them each one dollar back. So each of the three guys has not spent $9 and the bellhop has $2, for a total of $29 Where’s the extra dollar?”

It’s misdirection, misapplied association, and basically the same thing used in the next chapter to “prove” (a la Georg Cantor) that some infinities are “bigger” (or “stronger”) than others. Now, Barrow does quote Galileo: “we cannot speak of infinite quantities as being the one greater or less than or equal to another”, and narrate some about Cantor’s problems with mental illness (not uncommon among those who’ve wrestled with problems resultant from assuming there can be “orders of infinity”). Cantor’s sleight of hand involves distinguishing “countable” and “uncountable” infinities, then proclaiming that, since a one-to-one correspondence of irrational numbers and rational numbers cannot be made (and there are even problems ordering irrational, and most certainly imaginary, numbers), the sets cannot be equal (the set of irrational numbers is “infinitely bigger than the natural numbers or the fractions.”).
One problem with this had already been addressed in Barrow’s book: in the 14th century, Albert of Saxony showed that an infinite amount of something bigger does not represent more than an infinite amount of something smaller. “Take an infinitely long beam of wood, with a square cross-section of size 1 unit by 1 unit. Now saw it up into cubes of equal size. You will have an infinite number of these cubes which you can now use as building blocks.” With these blocks, you could “fill the whole of an infinite three-dimensional space!” The infinite has strange properties, including not becoming smaller when something is subtracted from it… and not needing a one-to-one correspondence with another infinity.
One of Barrow’s chapters is titled, “Infinity Comes in Three Flavours”. They are mathematical infinities, physical infinities (!) and absolute infinity (!!!). Interestingly, in George Gamow’s “One Two Three… Infinity” (© 1947, 1961), there are reputed to be only three orders of infinity: the number of all integers, the number of all geometrical points, and the number of all curves. These are supposedly “enough to count anything we can think of” – except imaginary numbers. And, to give them credit, mathematicians have certainly shown some imagination. But, then again, much of modern math simply doesn’t apply to the world we can experience.

Not yet half-way through Barrow’s book, I was impressed with his discussion of “string theory”. He describes Roger Penrose’s proposal that there’s “a principle of ‘cosmic censorship’ in nature, so that all singularities, or physical infinities, where the laws of Nature break down, are hidden from the outside universe by horizon surfaces.” I’ll leave it to the reader to interpret that, or not. After a bit, he goes on, “Up until 1974, black holes were believed to be inescapable matter traps. Once you passed in through the horizon there was no escape. Then Stephen Hawking predicted that black holes should not be completely black. Their strong gravitational fields will gradually produce pairs of particles close to the horizon at the expense of the mass and energy of the black hole. Gradually the mass of the hole will evaporate away.” Then, “Physical infinities will be nuanced by the laws of Nature.” Barrow claims that string theorists (well, “particle physicists”) don’t believe in physical infinities (which is fine by me). “Since the 1980s, string theory has shown how these infinities can be avoided by changing our conception of what the most elementary pieces of the Universe look like.” Well, of course, they don’t “look” like anything – you can’t see them. But it can be postulated that they have shape… well, sort of, anyway. Instead of things imploding into a crunch of infinite density, a ‘bounce’ at finite density and temperature results “from a previous state of contraction, or by a non-expanding state that suddenly bursts into motion.”
Reminding me of word games like Noam Chomsky trying to use words to explain words (it can’t be done, anymore than my infinity can be truly shown to be larger than yours, see Gödel's Theorem). But Chomsky the political critic makes some interesting points, including that, if the Nuremberg laws were applied, then “every post-war American president would have been hanged.” At a news conference in 1977, President Jimmy Carter said about the Vietnam War, “We have no need to apologize or castigate ourselves or assume the status of culpability. We do not owe a debt. Our intentions were to defend the freedoms of the South Vietnamese, and the destruction was mutual.” Never-mind that the Vietnamese saw themselves as defending their homes. Word-tricksters have been at it for thousands of years, calling the opposition, pre-emptively, what they know they are themselves, or God “That than which no greater can be conceived”, or telling you that you have no right to criticize “authority” as you simply do not know enough.
Some try to justify "orders of infinity" through a trick of mis-direction whereinwhich it's shown that some sets have no one-to-one relationship with others, and therefor must be larger. This is spurious. The concepts of infinity and one-to-one relationships have no direct, or logical, connection. To compare one infinite series to another establishes nothing, but perhaps the fact that so many have believed that it does establish establish something, itself establishes something. People will believe anything they find reason to want to believe.

A visit to the USA

Running around in the USA taking care of lots of paperwork, I haven't been able to think of posting anything here for a while. But there's a backlog of things to think about and write on now, when I'm back home. Some Hopi friends fly to Japan the same day I leave; a member of the Quaker Meeting here has been turning Roden Crater (a volcanic core big hill) into a kind of artistic light display from which one can watch the sky well, without a telescope, and I'm back to thinking about rabbits (brushing angoras for fur which can be spun and woven, writing about possible crossbreeds, trying to photoshop a better book cover...)...
Some hustle must be pursued back home, including work on a tax ID number for my wife and a passport for her youngest sibling, so that he can keep our son good company on another visit here - thier first - in a few years.
Nice to see that my self-built home has withstood forces of nature!
Will be even nicer to be back with my wife and son.